THE AMERICAN FAITH IN MASSIVE ED UCA TIONAL ENDEA VOR 479
modernizers said that society was now so complex and changing so rapidly that higher
education must give the student an integrating and unifying experience In order to
prepare him more directly for living in an interdependent world wide civilization.
Whatever form such revisions took and whatever the specific details with which
they were worked out, at least two aims predominated. One was to give more
attention to the needs of the individual student and greater meaning to Ms college
study than was possible in large, impersonal courses and lectures. The second was to
relate college study more closely to the fundamental problems of modern civilization
and to give students a more integrated approach to their study of and participation in
modem life.
The modern-oriented educators realized that the emergency demands of World
War I! for vocational, technical, and scientific training reflected not only the needs of
a nation at war but required a new look at the crises facing a modernizing nation in
peace. In the face of an appallingly rapid and vast technological explosion they
realized that they could not maintain the old snobbery concerning practical education
but rather that both cultural and professional aims must be synthesized into a new
outlook appropriate to the modern world. They realized also that no amount of
training, whether intellectual or cultural or scientific or technological, would be
worthwhile if it was not oriented to a responsibility for achieving and maintaining a
just, a free, and an equal society in the United States and a just and peaceful order In
the world. But they had to reckon with a world which was in the revolutionary process
of reacting against 500 years of domination by the West.